What do i need to do to make my PC render faster?

[7angofragger]

Hey, i am a senior in high school, and i am also a member of FIRST Robotics (www.firstrobotics.org) (i think i am on dial up...) anyways, part of the requirements for participating in FIRST Robotics, is our team has to make a 30 second animation clip in 3DS Max 2006. Well, our school purchased 3 licenses of the software.. I have one, and 2 of the school pc's have one. The school's PC's are P4's with HT (around 1.8-2.4GHz), 512MB ram, i think ddr400, and on board Intel graphic accelerators. they are really slow rendering... like 3 and a half hours to render 100 frames (about 15 seconds). I estimate, when i have everything done, on the school pc's, it should take around 10 to 20 hours to render... And if it messes up, i have to start over again. My PC, is an AMD 4000+, 2GB DDR400 Dual channel, and an ATI X1950Pro Xtreme Edition. My pc is about twice as fast to render then the school pc's. Buy a friend of mine has an ATI FireGL v3100 pci x 16. If i put that card in, would it render faster? or how could i make my PC render animation faster???

 

[Impr3ssiv3]

it depends whether or not is 3DS Max is setup to use the FireGl's hardware or not

 

[The_Other_One]

I beleive most of the rendering speed is from the processor rather than the GPU. More cores/processors, the faster(typically) things render. A good example...

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=430&model2=464&chart=188

 

[mrjack]

I beleive most of the rendering speed is from the processor rather than the GPU. More cores/processors, the faster(typically) things render. A good example...

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=430&model2=464&chart=188

Yep, the CPU usually does all the rendering unless the renderer you're using has support for rendering with the GPU then it can utilize that. But usually the GPU, if ever used, is given the task to calculate the shaders in the scene.

And 7angofragger, 100 frames is 4 seconds if you have a constant framerate of 25 which is the minimum for a smooth animation. So if we do the math to calculate how many frames you need for 30 seconds worth of material it's:

30x25=750

So it'll take a while to render. What renderer are you guys using? Cause you could probably use other computers, with the software installed, to render, too. Just like a renderfarm.